Freedom and resentment and other essays

Strawson, P. F. (2008). Freedom and resentment and other essays. Routledge.

【重要论文】Freedom and resentment

该篇的问题是“自由意志与决定论”，从“怨”的角度来探究。

作者区分出reactive attitude和objective attitude。前者，意味着至少我还是人际关系中的参与者，所以我会怨恨；后者意味着我把对方当作客体（比如变态、不是人）看待。决定论的语用意义，在后者得到运用。

以下是SEP（斯坦福百科）对该文的概括。

Strawson always joked that he would turn to moral philosophy only when his powers were waning. He wrote very little on the topic, commenting later on his ‘Freedom and Resentment’ and ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideal’, that ‘[b]etween them, these two papers effectively embody all I have thought or have to say in a philosophical area which, important as I recognize it to be, I have never found as intellectually gripping as those to which I have given more attention’ (Strawson 1998, 11). Nevertheless, ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (Strawson 1962) is perhaps now Strawson’s most famous and widely discussed paper.

Strawson’s aim in this paper is to dissolve the so-called problem of determinism and responsibility. He does this by drawing a contrast between two different perspectives we can take on the world: the ‘participant’ and ‘objective’ standpoints. These perspectives involve different explanations of other people’s actions. From the objective point of view, we see people as elements of the natural world, causally manipulated and manipulable in various ways. From the participant point of view, we see others as appropriate objects of ‘reactive attitudes’, attitudes such as gratitude, anger, sympathy and resentment, which presuppose the responsibility of other people. These two perspectives are opposed to one another, but both are legitimate.

Strawson’s paper notes two broad ways in which we can withdraw from the participant perspective. The first involves cases in which the agent remains someone to whom reactive attitudes are appropriate but where something about the circumstances means that the attitude is not appropriate in this particular case. Perhaps you stood on my foot because you were pushed. In this case, you have a good excuse for your behaviour and resentment is no longer appropriate. The second involves cases in which the agent has more or less permanent incapacities which remove them from the domain of reactive attitudes in general. Perhaps the person who stood on my foot is a child or in the grip of some psychopathological illness. In these cases, we cease to treat the agent as a fitting object of reactive attitudes, even if only temporarily.

Strawson takes these observations about the reactive attitudes to bear on the reconciliation of determinism and responsibility because of the inescapability of the reactive attitudes. They are a central part of what it is to be human. The truth of determinism cannot, then, force us to give up the participant standpoint, because the reactive attitudes are too deeply embedded in our humanity. Between determinism and responsibility there can be no conflict.

‘Freedom and Resentment’ has spawned an extensive literature. It introduced the notion of reactive attitudes to debates about free will and responsibility and one set of questions raised by the paper concerns the nature of these attitudes. Strawson characterises them initially as those belonging to involvement or participation with others in interpersonal human relationships and he takes them to target the good will of others as manifested in their behaviour. Others have broaded the notion, instead emphasising their connection to holding someone to some expectation or demand (see Wallace 1994). Another set of questions concerns the relation between the reactive attitudes and moral responsibility. Gary Watson, in a paper first published in 1987, reads Strawson as holding that the reactive attitudes are constitutive of moral responsibility and raises a challenge for such a view in explaining our attitudes towards cases of extreme evil (Watson 2004). Others have queried whether Strawson intends the reactive attitudes to have such explanatory priority (Alvarez 2021)

参考Snowdon, Paul and Anil Gomes, "Peter Frederick Strawson", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/strawson/>.